There was a hint, I thought, or wished, of a Russified Jack London in the childhood and adolescence of Mikhail Kalashnikov. The expanses of Siberia standing in for the Pacific north-west perhaps; there was an old rifle for hunting in the woods; the mysterious gift of an American Browning revolver, to be wondered at, taken apart and cherished; an artisan's fascination with mechanical things; and even an epic trek, 500 kilometres from Nizhnyaya Mokhovaya back to Kalashnikov's birthplace in Kurya, near the Kazakhstan border.

But then Kafka would intrude, for this is the 1930s. Nizhnyaya Mokhovaya was a penal colony to which the "rich" peasant Kalashnikov family had been hellishly transported by Stalin in 1932, and where Mikhail's father - along with many others among the millions of Siberian deportees - died after his first winter. And Mikhail's 1935 trek - dodging killer militia patrols - was that of an adolescent on the run in a world of murderous anarchy and random terror, which anticipates that which dominates swaths of our planet just now, terrains where Kalashnikov's greatest creation plays a most significant role.

For Kalashnikov is the Soviet patriot who, six decades ago, gave the world the AK47 semi-automatic assault rifle. With 650 rounds pumped out a minute, Kalashnikov's cheap and cheerless, charismatic assembly of tube and wood has, with added global trickle-down, put mass slaughter inside the budgets of ordinary Joes - and Abdullahs and Reiks - everywhere.

AK47 codifies avtomat (automatic), the designer's name, Kalashnikov, and the year of its invention, 1947, deep in cold war permafrost. The rifle was not to be the fastest, most accurate, most lethal, but there would be 70m of them, and growing, because it was to be the rifle that could be dropped from heights, buried in mud, filled with sand, submerged and reassembled in minutes, and still reliably transform human beings into screams, blood and pulp.

An illiterate Russian peasant, sucked into the Red Army, could have speedily got to work with the AK47 on anyone rash enough to challenge the mighty Soviet Union - such as the Hungarian revolutionaries of 1956 - so it clearly had potential for everybody in the killing game. Updates followed, together with the opening of AK production lines outside the Soviet Union; China opened the floodgate in 1956, as the AK emerged as the weapon of national liberation and - Hodges makes a tricky distinction - international terrorism.

Thus did AK47-equipped cadres of Vietnam's National Liberation Front battle GIs with their malfunctioning M16s (even if its millionaire inventor, unlike Kalashnikov, earned commission on each gun); Palestinians took on the Israelis and scored fleeting victories; while, in this bright new century, Sudanese child soldiers surfed human waves with their Kalashnikovs into the adult world - and died amid the baked scrub. Describing a 400-strong escape by those lost souls, the author explains how, "to avoid the madness and pain of dying of thirst, boys put their AKs in their mouths and pulled the trigger".

Reading Hodges, I mused on what curious, creative times those immediate postwar years were, with splendidly durable wheels and guns and rock'n'roll consumer durables making their first, tentative appearances on the market, albeit largely inspired by the efforts of the 20th century's two leading psychopaths, Hitler and Stalin. Production of mid-century liberalism's chariot of choice, Hitler's cheap and cheerful Volkswagen, began at Wolfsburg in 1948. Two years later, admittedly without dictatorial guidance, came the Fender Telecaster electric guitar, enabling John Lennon, 20 years on, to croon "Happiness is a warm gun" with Fender accompaniment, just as those GIs were listening in on their transistors, while ducking Vietnamese AK47s.

It was the success of the AK47 against the US itself that established its mystique among the people who had found themselves at the wrong end of its sights. So impressed were the Americans that they started producing their own AKs - those made from 1976 by Bingham's of Georgia "had stocks of beech and walnut to emphasise their woodsman credentials". And, as is the American way, it all came together; boosted by movies like The Deerhunter and Rambo First Blood Part II, gun clubs and gangsta rap, the US has "turned the AK47 into the Coca-Cola of small arms, a brand that infiltrated the consciousness of the planet".

Hodges likens Rambo (firing an AK47 blind over his shoulder) to "John Wayne meets the Kalashnikovs". Wayne? Surely too grown-up to equate with the Reagan-era infantile regression of Stallone/Rambo/AK47 - monster baby, death rattle. There are many ironies. The huge, semi-derelict Izhmash plant in Izhevsk, now capital of the Russian Federation Republic of Udmurtia, was the AK's birthplace, but it has been almost driven out of business by foreign competition. As for Osama bin Laden's first AK, it would have been owned by a Palestinian in Lebanon, says Hodges, captured by Israel, and shipped to him courtesy of the CIA.

The book works thanks to some spectacular reportage and because its author traces, without glorification, how the appliance of science kills human beings, building the narrative around people like those kids in sub-Saharan Africa where the AK "moved from being a tool of the conflict to the cause of the conflict". Wars always generate skilled young killers - witness Jesse James or post-first world war proto-Nazi Freikorps - but now the globe is awash with them, and with AKs.

· Nigel Fountain's World War II: The People's Story is published by Michael O'Mara/Readers Digest